BeeBapoRu

I'll never have a fluent-sounding accent when I speak Spanish. It's pretty good, but if I have an accent, it's an English one. Which stands to reason I suppose, since that's where I'm from. It's easy enough to spot although there's the exception maybe when I'm on the phone and my caller can't see me and realise that there's no way a tall blond/gray sunburned Swede with blue eyes like me could ever be from Murcia.

It's a pity really, as I only started to learn Spanish when I was thirteen. The sounds eluded me, whereas I began with French at the age of six, and thus, although I've since forgotten a lot of the vocabulary, when speaking to a Frenchman I tend to sound like an alcoholic from Lyon who must have just that very moment misplaced the precise words he needed. 

Also, in French, there are a hundred ways of saying 'you know what I mean, um, at the end of the day...' and other useless fillers to ward off actually saying something useful. In Spain, all we have is coño.   

We need context when we talk in Spanish - which means we need to know the society in which we are moving - the food, the geography, the politicians and the film-stars. So, there's another reason to watch the Spanish news on the TV. 

I clearly lean towards the parrot-theory of language: it's not what you say - it's how you say it. After all, no one is listening anyway, they are just waiting politely for their turn. One clever way to pick up the cadence and the various tics that belong to a language is to imitate it when speaking in your own. French lends itself to this - as we know from watching 'Ello 'Ello (here). And so why not Spanish as well?

We must then turn to the detail. It's easy enough to work the jota, the sound in such words as bujía, jamás and reloj, although they say that smoking helps, and it's a little harder to get the rr right: pero and perro. Then there's our friend the Ñ (called an 'eñe' - or 'enye' if you are missing it on your keyboard), which for some reason the British newspapers like to switch for the letter N, giving rise to such horrors as Espana, cono and Feliz Ano. 

The LL is easy enough, pronounced like the middle bit in William (although, oddly, there's a war in Spanish between the LL and the Y). Actually, the ll was considered as just another letter of the Spanish alphabet until 1994, as was the ch. 

It made playing Scrabble easier: a point which is rarely made. 

For us Brits, I think that the Spanish J is the big one, and here's Camilo Sexto singing his 1975 hit Jamás (Never!), if you feel like practicing the jota and singing along. 

After all, that's what your parrot would do. 

The confusion in Spanish between the letters B and V works in our favour I think, as we hear them differently while they hear them as the same. As the old Latin joke goes, the great thing about the Spanish is that they don't know the distinction between vivere et bibere; that's to say, between living and boozing. 

And who can argue with that?

One point that English-speakers need to remember when in the throes of speaking castellano (that's what they call it here) is to pronounce foreign words and names as a Spaniard would. I'm usually called Lenon (like the pop singer) Andrew is Andréu. William is Guílian. It gets worse. The singer JJ Cale is Jota Jota Kalay. 

My title BeeBapoRu refers to how one calls a popular unguent available at the farmacia which one rubs on one's chest. That's right: it's Vicks Vapour Rub as pronounced by the chemist. If that doesn't work by the way, then drink a Bloody Mary (un bludi) with plenty of salsa guorsesterechaer and lie down for a bit.

And practice that Camilo Sesto song.

Being There (Hosing Edition)

Like many people, I'm not much of a gardener. Sometimes I remember to go and squirt everything with the hose, for which the shrubbery is suitably grateful, perhaps even rewarding me with a flower or two. Other times... well, I was doing something else, you know how it is. 

Here in our neck of the world, it's hot, and the garden (lovingly laid down by my mum back in the sixties) needs lots of attention. Unlike the household chores, which brings you back to where you were before you scruffied things up, or made lunch, or spilled a gin and tonic on the carpet, the garden moves slowly forward, and of course, upwards.

There's even the odd occasion when, in a burst of enthusiasm, I find myself driving over to the vivero, to buy something which could be perfectly de-potted and decanted into that space near the olive tree which hasn't produced anything of interest since the dog dug up the marihuana plant last year. 

Gardening means pruning, cutting, digging, uprooting, weeding, bug-removing, planting and, above all, watering.

Three times a week, I say to myself, water everything you love and the garden will one day look peachy, just like it used to a generation ago. 

Then of course - and this is key to a happy horticulturist - remember to switch off the garden-tap after use.

Once you have forgotten to switch off the hose, and moved on to other duties like shopping, watching the TV or driving to Barcelona for the weekend, the gaily-coloured tube will carry on pumping water to that one surprised, grateful and eventually waterlogged and dead geranium until such time as the call to put on a straw hat, rinse one's face with Factor Fifty and go outside and water the garden returns. Which - at best - is every two days. It's not like forgetting to switch off the soup, or pull up one's zipper, or watch the news. When one is not in the garden, one is not switching off the hose.

The water bill, which arrives at the end of every two months, is suddenly through the roof. It's happened to me a couple of times, and blast it, it happened again this weekend. I forgot to turn the hose off. I had filled a watering can to access an outlying violet and then went off to save the world from the space invaders and, well, you know how it is.

By the time I had retaken Aldebaran, the garden was looking like the Red Sea. 

This brings about another problem; I mean, besides the bank-loan to pay the water company. 

The unseasonable flood has brought me a ton of weeds and stinging nettles. And snails. 

I am also pretty sure that my mum visited me last night. I wasn't asleep when she came. 

I'm in the garden now. 

Watering.

Adiós Facebook. Hello Vida

I've given up with Facebook.

This time, they jailed me for another month after putting a frivolous comment on a Spectrum Radio post about the new proposal to double-pack passengers on a flight.

I wrote: 'Why not knock them unconscious and stack them in the hold'.  Pathetic perhaps, but hardly revolutionary.

The Thought Police were quick on the uptake and gave me another month to cool my heels (I had just got out that day from an earlier and equally stupid sentence). 

Facebook - where one isn't even allowed the luxury of a kangaroo court. Where the power to close one down is evidently in the hands of faceless gnomes.

It raises the question - are they really watching us, or is there a filter that catches the key words like 'unconscious', or do people with a loose understanding of the word 'fair' routinely report their rivals (apparently one can)?

Facebook takes my money for promoting a site of mine called 'Business over Tapas', that I can't even visit.

Indeed, I'm currently barred from putting as much as a 'like' on a post, and friends don't know I've been removed from all activity because I can't tell them. For that matter, I am not permitted to send even a 'like', much less a heart emoji, to a birthday friend.

They've even gone to the length of freezing the feed - with nothing new for me to see since I was thrown into the slammer

So, to Hell with Facebook.

It's a pity because, having been in desktop-publishing most of my life, I enjoyed seeing and posting on Facebook. I no doubt spent far too much time looking at it on the cell-phone (the average time spent on social media by those who use it, says Statista, is over two hours a day).

Me and Donald Trump both! 

Did you see that? It says '...usually takes a few weeks...'!

Still, with all this free time I now have, I can do all sorts of other things to fill my day.

Dig a hole, maybe.

Twins: A Tale of Two Cities

We danced, pranced and tottered around Mojácar during the magnificent Moors and Christians festival a few weeks back - fortuitously on the same weekend as similar festivals cheekily held in the two neighbouring towns of Carboneras and Vera, and please don't remind me about the consequently high cost of the costume rentals.

A festival which began in our case thirty four years ago in 1988 to remember the quincentenary of the Fall of Mojácar (whimsically touted as a 'peaceful transfer of power' from one bloodthirsty lot to another, a bit like what's going on right now in the Ukraine, come to think of it).

Doubly important this year, as a second anniversary has also fallen upon us.

Thirty years ago this week, the Elders of the town decided it was time to 'twin' with another city elsewhere. Perhaps, back in 1992, with the first flush of international tourism upon us, the swollen population of Britons living locally and the opportunity to travel abroad at a reduced and subsidised rate, they might have gone for Henley-on-Thames, or maybe Southend or perhaps Brighton.

The children could have perfected their English, as the Good People of Brighton swapped their brood with their Mojaquero colleagues for a fortnight. The wealthy Henlyans might have bought some decent houses here (in those days, unfortunately, we were only building small apartments - there's more profit in them, even if the dwellers are poorer and short-term).

Maybe they could have chosen some place in Romania to adhere to. It might have sounded like a good idea if we had a socialist town hall, what will all the Romanian immigrants to the area back then, but we don't.

It's conservative. Money, souvenir shops and short rentals preferred.

At any rate, and no doubt after much discussion, we chose to join our futures and twin with a town in Andorra called Encamps ('Encamp' in Catalán).

Andorra is a fascinating place, in many ways, it's a sort of Spanish Gibraltar. Encamps itself is a charming resort with good skiing, lots of shops, a population of
13,000 souls and fourteen banks.

Not much to do with Mojácar you might think, but did I mention the banks?

Every year a bus-load of visitors head north, their bank-books held firmly, to enjoy the attractions of the local restaurant and hostal.

It's all quite convivial and works both ways as look, in our photo, there's some of the Encamps people here in Mojácar to enjoy the Moors and Christians festival. We hope they stayed for the jolly parade on Sunday night (is that a mannequin standing next to our tourist councillor dressed here in purple?).

The story goes that our small inland neighbouring pueblo of Turre was highly impressed by our choice of the twinned town. They famously had a plenary meeting on the subject of finding something equally suitable for them. 'We don't want anything too foreign', they argued, driving a pencil line through most of Europe, 'or really anywhere that is different in their moral values from ourselves' (Catalonia fell from the list with a quiet thud). 'No one who might swamp us with different ideas, incomprehensible languages or food that's picante or runny, and anyway, we don't want to subsidise expensive bus tickets for our inhabitants...', they agreed.

In the end, so goes the story, after several rounds with the porrón, they decided the best answer would be to twin with Mojácar. I'm not sure that Mojácar picked up the gauntlet though.

I like the collection of flags which can be seen in the Plenary Room at the Mojácar town hall. There's the Spanish one, the Andalusian one and the Andorran one there, all in a row.

And if the Andorran ensign is coincidentally the same as the Romanian flag, who are we to quibble?

Spanish Warming (Written Just Before a Cooling Rainstorm)

It’s getting hotter each time around, and worse still, it’s getting hotter earlier.

This may be because I’m becoming older, and it’s just a subjective opinion, or it could be that the meteorologists, climate scientists and environmentalists are right: global warming is occurring and, on first impression, that’s not good.

The record high temperatures reported this year at the poles must be a concern. All that ice melting into the sea can only mean that, sooner or later, the coastal cities are in for a nasty shock. It’s starting already with Venice, and perhaps we have seen those mock-ups of London, the Netherlands or Seville under water.

And really and for true, using less shower-water; or putting the plastic bottles in the right-coloured trash-container; or cutting out the inconsiderate use of ear-wipes, are all very commendable things to do, but at the same time – it won’t make an atom of difference. The major polluters: the oil companies, plastic container-users, the coal burners, the cruise ships, those who chop down the forests and those who sell us the SUVs – none of them will slow down their drive for profits – even if it kills them.

Recycling – the great panacea to our industry-encouraged over-consumption – is more of a chimera that a reality. Did you see that mountain of unsold clothing dumped in Chile? Did you think that plastic can be melted down and used again? The Chinese don’t want our old plastic bottles or the sun-bleached sheets from the invernaderos anymore. How about those accidental fires over at the vehicle and tire-dumps?

Spaniards are worried about the climate-change which they are experiencing, but they are not necessarily prepared to do much about it. No one accepts a higher tax on petrol, or to eat less meat, muchas gracias.

We put up with not getting a free shopping bag from the supermarket – as we load all of the heavily wrapped-in-plastic products we took off the shelves into a cloth-bag. Who are we fooling here?

Those of us who are older must worry for our children and those that come after. We think that they won’t have it as well as we did: even if they can afford an air-conditioning system.

This latest heat-wave we have suffered in Spain, where apparently half-cooked baby birds fell from their nests in Córdoba, is said to be nothing compared to what is coming in the years ahead.

Most of Spain is on a high-plateau. The coastal bits are relatively benign, but the inland parts of the country suffer temperature extremes. Ándujar (Jaén) has just reported a new June record for Spain, at over 44ºC. Last year’s August 14th record of 47.4ºC in Montoro (Granada) still stands for the moment.  The World Meteorological Organisation says that this heat wave just settling down now was around 10ºC hotter than the usual for this time of the year in Spain and France and furthermore, ‘was a harbinger of things to come’.

Together with the fires (another sad record in Zamora this week with 30,000 hectares burned), the polluted lagoon at el Mar Menor in Murcia and the generic desertification, we are indeed facing an uncertain future.

Summer, by the way, began on Tuesday – what we just went through, that was Spring.

Eve and the Trippers

I was in our local cemetery, where the foreigners at last lie in peace with their Spanish neighbours. Walking around slowly: looking out for my parents, for old friends and for people I knew. Here is the British bullfighter; there the Air-Vice Marshall. Here is my dad. There is my mum. Here's Fritz the artist, who's headstone claims he was born on November 31st, a month with only thirty days. Old Pfeiffer, whose apfelstrudel was all the rage in Vienna, is there: dead these forty years. And then I saw the stone for Eve Steinhauser, who despite her name, was an Englishwoman who worked for Horizon Holidays.

I had also worked for them, briefly, when I was 17; taking tourists round the sites (the sights) in Crete, the old Minoan Civilization. A posh accent describing the Minotaur to retired doctors, bank-managers and their wives. I was at the top end of the tour-operator's offer, a subsidiary of the holiday-company called Wings.

Eve had been sent to Mojácar by Horizon to see if it was worth bringing their holidaymakers to the small resort. Mojácar doesn't really work as a tour destination - it is a pretty village two kilometres away from the sea on a high hill, with beautiful views, and with a long coastline (for all practical purposes) of a dozen kilometres. From your hotel to wherever you wish to walk... is a long pull. There was no bus then although there was a couple of old taxis - we are in the early seventies; but there wasn't much to do after a hot walk, besides take the inevitable tour to the cowboy town in Tabernas an hour away in a coach (cue some Morricone music) or see some dodgy Flamenco in the hotel disco.

So Eve, conscious of the fact that a man who works in a toothpaste factory wants a holiday that won't stop, knew that Mojácar wasn't the right place. There was just one hotel in the village that could work and nothing of any size on the beach.

But then she met my mother.

Heather had suffered from encephalitis some years before she came with my dad and myself to Mojácar in 1966. The scars in her mind were slight, but she had no spacial memory, no recent memory, and she had somehow lost the bit that stops you from being rude to strangers.
 

+ One night in the bar +

Eve - I'm here to see if Mojácar is the right place for a tour operator.

Heather - Don't you f***ing dare to bring in those a***holes to our town you horrible woman.

Lenox writhing in embarrasment.

Eve would tell the story (since my mother forgot) - I had quite decided to tell Horizon against coming to Mojácar, until Heather changed my mind.

So, the company came to the village, to turn it into a resort. They bought a second hotel on the hill, a hulk which they were forced to demolish, before rebuilding it alarmingly over-budget. With the new hotel, the Moresco, and the other place above it, the Hotel Mojácar (built with public money by Roberto Puig - a Valencian who couldn't bear the thought of customers in his hotel), Horizon Holidays opened Mojácar, as my mother would say, to the f***ing trippers.

Horizon was bringing in tourists, the Mojácar people reacted accordingly. The foreign residents, who had brought in money, bought houses and opened bars, were quickly dropped in favour of the trippers. Nicknack shops opened, and Old Jacinto the mayor changed the name of the main street up to the village from the Generalísimo to Avenida Horizon.

The company, now heavily invested in Mojácar, was allowed to build another hotel, an ugly skyscraper on the far end of the beach: a twelve storey monstrosity called the Hotel Indalo. Shortly after this, as the millions of British trippers insisted on continuing to enjoy their holidays in Benidorm, several hundred kilometres up the coast, Horizon quietly went bust.

Clarksons came and went, as did other tour-companies of the era. Mojácar attempted to sell the tourists (here on a shoe-string holiday) small and squashed-together apartments. No one was buying villas any more.

With an ever-larger presence of Britons in the town, whether living here or merely visiting, it was only a matter of time before we twinned with a tourist town, and where more appropriate than Encamp, the Andorran town famous for its banking with no questions asked. The Avenida Horizon became the Avenida Encamp. The Hotel Mojacar was rebuilt as apartments, the Hotel el Moresco has been closed since 2008 (never to reopen). The Hotel Indalo along the beach is now the Hotel Best and the playa itself is now full of bars, ice cream joints and of course, an unending supply of nicknack shops selling Chinese-made goods.

Residents don't buy souvenirs, but (to employ my mother's word), trippers do.

Benidorm, meanwhile, continues to grow.

Could You Say That Again, Slowly?

An interesting subject here. Spain is the only country that prohibits the use of its place-names in Spanish where local versions/names occur. Mostly. 

Gerona or Girona? Sangenjo or Sanxenxo? Jávea or Xàbia? The local version often takes precedence, which is a bother if you don’t know that Iruña is another way of saying Pamplona (apparently Pampeluna in English says Wiki) or Elx is Elche. 

Or Maó is Mahón.

A few other cities have an English version (we use Seville over Sevilla and Majorca over Mallorca even if we have given up on The Corunna).

Sometimes – in the Basque country at least, they just use both – like Vitoria-Gasteiz (well, officially anyway). 

Then there are the English-language newspapers that for some reason don’t have an ‘ñ’ on their keyboards, bringing us the joys of Logrono, Peniscola and Salobrena.

And the seasonal Feliz Ano of course. 

Come to think of it, the Catalonians prefer Catalunya to Cataluña (they haven’t used the ñ since 1913).

Spain therefore bends over backwards (mostly) to accommodate regional variants – Lleida for Lérida, Eivissa for Ibiza (I mean, really!) and so on, whereas other countries just use the regular name (imagine the weather forecaster on British TV saying Caerdydd instead of Cardiff or Dùn Èideann for Edinburgh).

However, when the Spanish go abroad, it’s all Londres, Estocolmo, Nueva York and Pekín. 

Finally, how about the Galician name for Xibraltar!

Almería: Cowboy Country

When I think of my province – Almería – I don’t bring to mind flamenco dancers eating enormous plates of paella after an enjoyable afternoon at the bullfight explaining the minutiae of the spectacle to aghast tourists.

Hideous plastic farms aside (and I live completely surrounded by them), I’m gonna go along with the cowboys.

I learned my Spanish from going twice-weekly to the old pipa-theatre, the summer cinema open to the stars (late-showings only) and began with ‘hands up’ and rapidly progressed to ‘die, you dirty dog’ – useful on so many occasions, and especially now, with the Russian army due to arrive later this week on the twelve noon from Numa.

The old pipa-theatres were so called, because you ate a twist of sun-flower seeds noisily from your wobbly wooden chair, which could be picked up and turned around to make it easier to chat more comfortably with one’s neighbours during the slow boring bits.

Of course, with a good cowboy film, shot locally and with an Italian, German or Spanish director, there weren’t going to be many boring bits for sure.

Barbara my Californian wife would say, oh look, those aren’t American horses, those are PREs (which is horsey-folk slang for Spanish nags) as the rest of us wondered how a German director could get an Italian actor to say ‘Hands Up!’ in Spanish.

The gigantic speakers, plus the simple story line (Die, you dog!) made it easy to both follow the plot and also to pick up some vocab.  Even today, I like my movies loud.

The movies were shot in Almería back in the golden years of regular visits to the cinema. The desert scenes of Tabernas were considered just the job for a good shoot-out and the extras came cheap enough. Sergio Leone and others like him managed to take an American original (we were all brought up on cowboys and Indians, stamped with the heavy American morals of the time) and improve upon it. Cut the chat, they figured correctly, and shoot somebody. Leone brought the camera close to the actor’s face and we could see the twitch in the eyes just before the guns blazed. The astonishing Ennio Moricone provided the music.

At 25 pesetas for a cracking good evening, with a beer or a soft drink for another ten, hold the pipas, it was blissful.

Tabernas today, a half century on, has several cowboy towns – or film-sets – open to the public. The largest is the Mini Hollywood now called Oasys with a museum, film posters of Anthony Steffen, Giuliano Gemma, Bud Spencer, Terence Hill (all Italians), Clint Eastwood, Lee van Cleef, Dan van Husen (who came to my 21st birthday party in Mojácar), Klaus Kinski and so many more. There’s a collection of old film-projectors, a zoo (for some reason), a bar with lots of character actors wandering around shooting each other as we complacently drink a beer and many other attractions besides.

They even lend you a cowboy hat and a revolver and take a picture of you looking either mean or else bemused (or in my case, mildly sun-stroked and drunk).

By the mid-seventies, the film-makers had moved on, as the local agents got increasingly greedy, and they began to make cowboy flicks in Yugoslavia or Morocco (‘Huh, that’s an Arab horse’ says Barbara derisively).

Nowadays, Tabernas gets a few adverts shot there and maybe a Spanish director will make a rare cowboy film (Pedro Almodóvar is filming one at present), and my old mate Eduardo, who has made his career by getting shot and dramatically falling off a galloping horse, will likely make a brief appearance in the second reel.

...
 

The history of the Spanish cowboy films at Valencia Plaza here explains how the local industry fell to pieces.

Breakfast on the Costa

In the eighties, a bumper-sticker plastered on the back of a number of vehicles in the USA’s most intriguing state would read ‘Welcome to California. Now Go Home’. Behind the wheel of the old rust-bucket bought from a dealer in Detroit (where else?), I felt a bit of an interloper driving around The Golden State with my travellers cheques, my snappy British accent and my half-empty jar of Ovaltine.

 

Tourism may not have been such a Big Thing in California, despite the popular song from Supertramp (here ya go) and the steady arrival of farmers from the Dust Belt looking for a decent job; but, at 12% of GDP (here), it’s certainly a Big Thing in Spain. Before the pandemic, around twice as many foreign tourists chose to enjoy Spain's charms as there are Spaniards living here. And, if that was not enough – with two people dressed in lederhosen, or with peeling noses, or perhaps wearing sticky ‘Gibraltar is British’ tee-shirts for every Spaniard, you can add the huge numbers of displaced Spaniards themselves – everyone has a right to a vacación – flocking to the same destinations.

 

Those resorts will have put up the flags, organised a fiesta and will be ready for the onslaught. Shops full of glitter, bars with cold beer and restaurants with fresh fish. The late night joints will be buzzing and the cops will be on every corner, complacently fingering their books of fines. A loud midnight buzz of people, fun, parties, botellones, noise, fire-crackers, sirens, arguments, screams, music, songs and the burble and bang from those irritating Harley Davidsons... The following morning, there’s the rubbish to clean up.

 

Money is made, vast amounts of money for the shop-keepers, the apartment owners, the barkeeps, the souvenir shops: the municipality itself – but that’s no consolation for the normal folk, those who live here year round, working in ordinary jobs or retired, who must somehow get through their day: past the jams, the queues, the noise and the dust.

 

The town fiesta: costumes and spectacle, paid with our taxes, is so full of visitors, that there’s no parking, no room, and no welcome for the locals who with resignation will decide to stay home and see it on the telly. ‘We’ll go next year’ they say.

 

The apartment block: with half of the flats rented out, a two-bed apartment with twelve people staying there, filling the pool for a late-night dip, uprooting the flower bed and being sick in the lift.

 

So now we have a new word: la turismofobia. And we read the headlines, particularly about Barcelona and Madrid, Granada and Palma, where the cities are taken over by the tourist hoards. How can one rent an apartment when the owner can earn five or ten times as much as a weekly tourist-let (legal or otherwise)? The football hooligans, over for a match between one of their and one of ours. The drunken swarms of young foreigners bellowing and vomiting their way across the coast-road. The staggering numbers of flights into Spain (275 million people passed through a Spanish airport in 2019). Then there are the cruise ships, with their sudden massive influx into the local port.

 

Worst of all, we simple guiris, as we negociate our way through the crowds of trippers, must make that same answer, over and over again: 'No, I'm no tourist, I live here'. In the old days, we stuck out by not carrying a camera. Now we have to wear long trousers instead.

 

This is a fabulous country and there are few better places to live; but on the car, there’s a new sticker. It reads: ‘Welcome to Spain. Now Go Home’.

The Driving Licence Issue - Resolved

My first road-legal vehicle was a Vespino. This is a moped with a 49cc motor. With such a machine, I could pedal away to help its small engine get me and a packet of cigarettes up the hill to the village. I was sixteen.

Following this, and a few other mopeds (the pedals were usually removed to make the bike look a bit racier, and the motorbike would be ‘trucado’ to get it up over whatever the limit was, I think it was 60kph in them days).

Like most young fellows, I wanted a car and, in 1975, the year that Franco died, I passed my driving licence in Huercal Overa and took over operation of the Peugeot that my dad had bought in Madrid a few years earlier on tourist plates (from Bert Schroder, if there are any old-timers reading this). A succession of cars followed, usually second-hand, and there it was – the perfectly normal story of a fellow living in España, trying to impress the girls with his wheels.

Many Brits living here in Spain, in this post-Brexit time, seem surprised that the rule to stop the legal use of a British driving licence for foreign residents of the British persuasion should not have been subject to yet another extension once again as May 1st 2022 rolled around. Somehow, many of us British are convinced that we should be allowed to be different from the American or South African resident or anyone else who aspires to drive on his home-licence.

The message evidently didn’t get through to the Spanish – we Brits are special. Oh, but we are allowed to drive with a British licence in France, we say – why not ’ere?

Thus, the cold water of reality now means classes and both a written and practical driving test, which is a serious bother. They’ll do a health check as well.

Mind you, one can always wing it – how many times does one get stopped by the tráfico anyway; and if you do, you simply explain to them in a condescending yet respectful way that you are British.

They’ll soon see your point and will no doubt wave you on your way with a crisp salute.

It’s clear that many of this unfortunate set of non-European foreign residents will need to bite the bullet and go through the rigmarole, and it is not easy. Fifty years driving and now told to watch your rear-view mirror and to hold the steering wheel properly, with three eighteen-year-olds squeezed across the back seats nudging each other and chuckling.

For some, the answer is a taxi or a bus. The Tarjeta SensentayCinco for the Oldies gets you discounts on travel. Or then there’s the car-share app Blablacar for long trips. For others, perhaps, one can acquire a vehicle that doesn’t need a full licence. Not the Vespino, no, nor a mobility scooter (not yet, anyhow), but something to do the shopping with or to go out as a couple to a favoured restaurant.

The answer to this is the ‘coche sin carnet’, the microcar. The reality is that one does need a licence for these, the same AM permit as for mopeds and three-wheelers (it’s very easy, just drive a zigzag and a circle). They have a limit of 45kph and, needless to say, with their egg-beater engine, they can’t go on the motorways.

There are a few brands available in Spain, including the Aixam, the Ligier, the Chatenet and the Microcar.

Even cooler is the all-electric city-car, the Citroën Ami (road-test here). To drive one, you just need to be sixteen years or older and perhaps equipped with a keen sense of humour.

It’s not easy changing one’s feathers as one gets older, but a golf-cart with windows, heating and a radio doesn’t sound so bad.

At this stage, who did you want to impress anyway?